Pietro Tries to Persuade Bruno to Leave Barma

Pietro Tries to Persuade Bruno to Leave Barma gathers two attempts by Pietro to reach his old friend after Bruno’s farming business collapses: first through a telephone call from Kathmandu, then in person at Barma. Pietro offers a home and his company, but also asks Bruno to reconsider the isolated life he has chosen. Bruno accepts the offer of help without accepting its implied destination. Their conversations make the house a shared inheritance and a refuge, while showing that friendship cannot by itself make Bruno leave the mountain.

The Inheritance Behind the Offer

Pietro’s offer takes on meaning through the history of Barma and his father’s mountain life. Back in the family kitchen, Pietro finds his father’s old map still pinned to the wall, transformed over two decades from a trail map into a dense record of routes. He deciphers its three colors: black marks his father’s climbs, red accompanies Pietro, and green identifies Bruno. The many journeys marked in black and green suggest that his father and Bruno often went walking together. Pietro feels a pang of jealousy, but also relief that his father had not always gone alone. The map gives physical form to a relationship that Pietro had only partly understood.

His mother’s account and the map alter Pietro’s understanding of his father. He comes to distinguish the city father from the mountain father, the walker who loved glaciers and left him a ruin to rebuild. Pietro decides to complete that work in remembrance of him. In September, when his mother visits the house he and Bruno have built, she sees the lake, the scree, the peaks of Grenon, and Pietro’s inscription for Giovanni Guasti. Pietro then declares that the house should belong to both him and Bruno. He believes this is what his father wanted, but stresses that he wants it himself because the two friends built the house together. This shared claim explains why, when Bruno later has nowhere to go, Pietro can call Barma his home as well as his own.

A Call from Kathmandu

In autumn 2013, Bruno declared himself bankrupt, closed the agricultural business, and handed the farm keys to the bailiff. Lara went to live with her parents with their child, Anita. Pietro’s mother tells him that Bruno has lost everything and is alone, and asks whether he can do anything. In Kathmandu, Pietro responds in a way he had never done before: he leaves the computer, asks to use the telephone, and calls Bruno in Italy. The call’s setting makes the distance concrete, but Pietro does not leave the exchange at the level of concern from afar.

Bruno asks whether he can use the house at Barma because he does not know where else to go. He says he does not want to see anyone and will spend some time in the mountains. Pietro tells him to stay as long as he likes and calls it Bruno’s house. He then asks whether he should come over. They have not been accustomed to asking each other for help or offering it, and Bruno’s answer is an uncharacteristically open acceptance: he says that would be nice. The call therefore changes their usual pattern of distance. Pietro does not merely grant access to the house; he offers his own presence, and Bruno lets the offer stand.

The Dispute About Anita and the Mountain

When Pietro later talks with Bruno at Barma, he asks directly what Bruno intends to do about Anita, what arrangements he has made with Lara, and whether he plans to visit them at Christmas. Bruno says probably not at Christmas, perhaps in spring, and then questions the point of bringing Anita to live with him in the mountains. His argument treats the separation between Barma and the rest of life as settled: he regards staying with her mother as preferable to bringing her into his own way of life.

Pietro hears more than a temporary delay in Bruno’s answer. Bruno speaks of Barma as though an invisible boundary separates his valley from the outside world, a wall that applies specifically to him. Pietro urges him to go down and suggests that he may be the one who needs to change his way of life. Bruno replies by invoking his own identity: he is the cowherd, the bricklayer, the man of the mountains, and above all his father’s son. Pietro recognizes the force of that identification, but also sees its cost. In his view, Bruno risks repeating his father’s disappearance from the life of his child. The conversation turns the question of leaving Barma into a conflict between a self-image rooted in the mountains and the responsibilities of a father living apart from his daughter.

Two Failed Rescues

Pietro leaves after this conversation, but the appeal does not end there. During another encounter, as they stand near the avalanche and the dead fish, he says that he is going for the second time in a few weeks and that twice he has tried and failed to rescue Bruno. He asks Bruno to come down with him. Bruno points out that Pietro has been trying to get him down for nearly thirty years, then reassures him that the mountain has never done him any harm. His response is affectionate, even wry, but it does not indicate that he will leave.

The ending preserves the difference between what the friends can offer and what they can decide for one another. Pietro can make Barma theirs, take Bruno’s call, travel to see him, and invite him down; he cannot make Bruno accept a different life. Bruno’s refusal is not presented as a simple rejection of Pietro. He accepts the house and the company, yet insists on belonging to the mountain and trusts it despite the dangers surrounding them. The repeated effort to persuade him thus measures the friendship’s endurance without resolving its central divide: Pietro keeps coming and going, while Bruno chooses to stay.